In a change of pace, let me link you to an article found in the papers of the late Kurt Vonnegut, the author of 'Slaughterhouse Five', by his son. Please take the time to read it, especially if you are concerned about the current flippant talk about war with Russia and even Iran.
About six years ago, I began to read about the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II that my father had been a part of as a B-17 pilot. I came to realize that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented only the tip of the iceberg of the destruction our Air Force had brought to our enemies in that war.
The bombing of Dresden late in the war has long been seen as an isolated instance of such bombing, when in fact, it was a fairly routine mission in the last two years of the war, when many dozens of cities in both Germany and Japan were leveled by saturation bombing. Vonnegut was present in Dresden as a prisoner of war and describes in this linked article what he experienced.
My interest in these things was piqued when I discovered that one of the last bombing missions that my own father flew was the mission over Dresden, on February 14, 1945.
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